


Distaff

by Tequila_Mockingbird



Category: Iron Man - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Canon Compliant, Female Tony Stark, Gen, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Pre-Iron Man 1, The Trousers of Time, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-16
Updated: 2017-02-16
Packaged: 2018-09-18 13:39:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9387524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tequila_Mockingbird/pseuds/Tequila_Mockingbird
Summary: Tony Stark’s hands were not his best feature; he knew this. His nails were ripped and his cuticles rough, and there was almost always machine oil somewhere.Antonia Stark’s fingers are always immaculately manicured, nails cut short so she can still work.





	

**Author's Note:**

> As usual, this is my weird mish-mash of MCU canon, comics canon, and things I've just made up; i.e. this is not the specific Earth 3490!verse from the comics. For most of the Tony-events, I've stuck with what we learn in Iron Man 1, 2, and 3. Happy International Fanworks Day!
> 
> Heads up for some minor issues of consent; details in the end note

Tony Stark’s hands were not his best feature; he knew this. His nails were ripped and his cuticles rough, and there was almost always machine oil somewhere. Pepper used to make him wash his hands before press conferences. His mother, he remembers, used to make him wash his hands before his special, once-a-month-only dinner with her and Howard—would inspect them and send him back upstairs if he’d missed a spot of dirt. It’s one of the clearest memories he has of her, the feel of smooth, cool palms twisting his hands over, the mild “tch” of disapproval.

***

Antonia Stark’s fingers are always immaculately manicured, nails cut short so she can still work. When she slips on the Iron Man gauntlets, her fingers vanish—she can punch, lift rubble, scrape along buildings, and when they come off there are her perfectly clean hands, smooth oval nails. She isn’t really sure if she likes that (Iron Man is all about accountability, yeah?) but her mother sitting her down at the vanity and painting clear varnish on is one of her only fond memories of Maria, before the disappointment began—Maria Stark, who never went out in public without pantyhose, without lipstick, without a perfect manicure. Every time she’d been photographed in some tabloid totally wasted, short skirt and smeared mascara, Toni knew her mother would have been ashamed of her, was ashamed of her.

They never talked about it. It never made her stop.

***

His mother died when he was twenty, but for all practical purposes she had faded away from Tony’s life long before that. Or he had—or both of them, really, always searching for a point of common ground and never really finding one. Howard had never approved of her ‘babying’ him, and Tony got shipped out to boarding school when he was seven and heading into sixth grade. And by the time he comes back for vacations she’s fallen into a bottle of bourbon, doesn’t really climb out until long after he’s fallen in himself, thirteen and bitter and wasted, a freshman at MIT and too old for his stupid mom. When she dies in December, 1991, he’s just told Jarvis to tell her that there’s no way in hell he’s coming home for Christmas. He hasn’t spoken to her directly in two years. She didn’t come to his graduation.

When he was five, he’d tripped and fallen, and she’d happened to be coming out of her room—okay, so maybe the fall hadn’t been completely an accident, and yeah, maybe five was too young for Tony to be weighing the cost-benefit of a scraped knee, but whatever, it’s done, can’t change it—and she’d scooped him up before his nanny got to him and wiped the scrape with something that stung and kissed him on the forehead and said he was ‘brave’ and bandaged it and sent him off again. He remembers the smell of her perfume and the sting of the iodine more than anything else, her hands soft and clean and nails perfectly polished. After the funeral he finds a bottle of her perfume on her dresser, sprays it into the air, but she’s changed scents sometime in the past twelve years, it smells all wrong and it’s no good and he smashes the bottle in a fit of—something. He can’t figure out what she was wearing when he was little, probably it’s been discontinued or something, no big deal, it’s not like he had any use for the stuff. Not like he cares.

***

Antonia was banished to her mother the moment she was born and Howard realized she was a girl, it feels like. She built a circuit board when she was four, showed it to him and he frowned, looked at her hands—all cut up, stained and dirty and nails ripped—told her this was no work for a girl and to go play with her mother. She’d built an engine when she was six, careful this time to wear gloves so that when she showed him her hands were pristine and perfect, but he’d still frowned and told her not to waste her time.

She stopped showing him things, after that. Toni sat through her mother’s lectures and makeovers and ignored her restrictions and snuck out into the lab. Uncle Obie caught her there when she was eight, hands carefully and dutifully in gloves but clutching a soldering iron, and instead of telling on her he’d just laughed, ruffled her hair and told her she was a little rebel.

She’d loved him for that, a little. More for the way he gave her engineering books for her birthday and a tour of the Stark Industries factory nearest New York and never tried to sell her on that bullshit pink and ruffle-y bedroom Maria had tried to force down her throat when she was five. Toni won that battle—her room was painted bright, fire engine red and decorated with motorcycle posters—and lost the war, over and over again, to Maria’s tight-lipped frown and exasperated sigh. To ‘sit up straight, Antonia,’ and ‘knees together, Antonia,’ and ‘ladies do not snort at the table, Antonia.’ When she’s nine years old she convinces—begs—Maria to send her to boarding school, anything to get out of the house and away from the bite in her mother’s voice.

When she’s ten years old and crying alone in a dormitory room because no one in eighth grade wants to be friends with a baby she wishes desperately, bitterly, to go home. But by then it’s too late. She has her pride.

Even if she has nothing else, she has that.

***

Tony always kind of wondered if Maria would have liked him better, if he’d been born a girl. They’d thought he was going to be one—he’d wormed the story out of Jarvis—and he wonders if she just never really got used to Anthony Edward instead of Antonia Elizabeth. After the funeral, Tony spends a couple of months drunk and wondering if the faint aftertaste of disappointment that’s almost all he can remember of her would be different, if he’d been different.

He stopped wondering if there was any way to please Howard long before the man died.

***

Toni got into MIT at fifteen on spit and luck, after bruising her way through high school and skipping most of middle school and scheming her way into skipped grade after skipped grade. They said they were worried about socializing her—they meant that girls were supposed to want friends. Were supposed to be invested in making the right sort of social connections at the elite all-girls private academy in Westchester, instead of obliterating the curve in math. Were supposed to look like ladies. Toni knew that she never quite did, not even when she wore the white lace gloves and demure skirt and sweater combinations and pinned her hair up just right. Something about her said loose, said fast, said dangerous even with pearls in her ears and half-inch, off-white pumps. The fact that she was a year younger than the freshmen and didn’t really have boobs yet didn’t seem to make much of a difference.

When Toni starts at MIT, she does it in blood red lipstick and skirts she bought in the children’s section at Macy’s, four inch heels she can’t really walk in. Her mother’s lips almost disappear, when she wanders past as Toni’s getting bundled into the car. She can’t see that Toni’s nails are perfect, oval and clean and French-tipped. All through five years of working sleepless and caffeine-crazed, of getting wasted on the streets of Cambridge and throwing up in the Charles and barely escaping arrest and never escaping the paparazzi, Toni keeps her nails neat, her French-tips never more than a week away from the stylist.

You can never see her nails in the magazines, anyway, the resolution isn’t good enough. And it’s not like she’s going home for Christmas. She graduates in five years with a double B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and Physics and an M.S. in Computer Science. Her parents don’t come to graduation.

***

When Tony was three years old, he made Maria a card for Mother’s Day. It was a kind of shitty card, but he was three, okay, and his motor control was great but his sense of the aesthetic wasn’t quite fully developed. It was bright green and red and blue and orange, and there were a lot of spirals and swirling lines and his oddly formal block print declaring her ‘the #1 mom’ and that he loved her lots.

He’s going through her things, a few years after the crash, in preparation for closing up the New York house and moving to Malibu. He finds the card, in with a bunch of financial papers for her charity work.

He establishes the Maria Stark Foundation a couple of weeks later, tells Obie with a smirk that it’s a going-away present to the city of New York, gets trashed and almost sets the damn card on fire but ends up tossing it in a box that ends up in the attic, a box with her old gloves and stockings and makeup and her wedding pictures and all the letters Howard wrote her.

***

Suddenly, when she turns twenty-one, everyone seems to notice that she’s a girl. It’s 1992 and there are three female CEOs of Fortune 500 Companies and Hillary Clinton is still just the president’s wife. Obie’s fine with it, he just laughs as he watches the board self-destruct and gives her a play-by-play each night while they eat pizza. When they finally figure out that yeah, duh, it’s her goddamn company, he takes her out to celebrate, gets her wasted—not that she doesn’t help on that front—tells her she’s a damn fine kid, always has been. Slaps her on the back and says he’ll see her tomorrow, Ms. Stark. Tells her he’s proud of her.

She’s painfully glad she’s wearing sunglasses, because he’s the last person she wants to see her cry.

***

Tony meets Captain James Rhodes at MIT, a year out of the Air Force Academy and getting his M.S. in Physics, for some strange reason willing to put up with the crazy fifteen year old undergrad who drinks whiskey alone in the labs in the middle of the night. James is only twenty, a bit of a wunderkind himself and something of an outsider in violently anti-war Cambridge and used to being the odd one out, the scholarship boy, and maybe that’s what does it, what makes him laugh when Tony flips him off and sit down instead of stomping off, haul the bottle of whiskey over by the neck and take a long drag.

He’s Rhodey in about two hours, and when he sticks around even after the hangover and into the next one, Tony thinks he might stick around a little longer. Maybe.

***

That first night, blitzed out of her mind, Toni tries to crawl into Rhodey’s lap, smears lipstick kisses down his face, and gets gently and firmly pushed back. She hesitates, confused, and he passes her the whiskey again, says something so stupid about the effect of alcohol on the static coefficient of friction that she has to laugh and rebut, grabbing a wrench and the bottle to demonstrate.

In the morning, mainlining coffee and shoving down French toast in a greasy diner right off campus, Toni lifts her sunglasses long enough to ask him why. He rolls his eyes and says she obviously wasn’t in any state to consent, and she pouts at him and tells him he’s no fun.

She never offers again, not seriously. She’s still not sure whether or not it was the right move.

***

Tony finds Pepper by accident. Well. To tell the truth, Pepper does all the finding. First the accounting error that would have cost Stark Industries a few million dollars and a lot of embarrassment, and then the man who made it, in pretty much that order. When he tries to fire her, she finds Tony.

He never asks her why a strawberry-blonde bombshell with an organizational mind, expensive tastes, and a genius for public relations is working in Accounting. Maybe he doesn’t want to know the answer. They settle into their weird, delightful, and dysfunctional relationship quickly, into her bossing him around and him ignoring her. Into her bringing him little demitasse of espresso and her opinion on everything and all the things he needs to sign, bringing him a cheeky smile and biting sarcasm and artwork he barely understands but can see that she loves, bringing him his dry-cleaning and his appointment calendar and a reason to wake up in the fucking morning.

He doesn’t bring her anything, doesn’t even try, lets her buy her own birthday gifts with his money and doesn’t tell her she’s one of only two people in the whole world who are allowed to hand him things.

He thinks she figures it out anyway.

***

JARVIS started out as an accident, not that Toni will admit it to anyone. DUM-E and U had begun at MIT, had been refined in a fit of furious, half-intoxicated rage, in the year after graduation, when she wasn’t speaking to her mother just because she was angry and not because her mother was dead.

JARVIS is the work of an Antonia whose mother is dead. She doesn’t have Pepper yet, Rhodey is in the Persian Gulf somewhere and Jarvis is doing all he can to keep her hydrated with something other than whiskey, much less get her to sleep, to eat, to leave the workshop that still smells like her father’s cologne, that still has his blueprints and his tools and his fucking cufflinks scattered everywhere. She disappears into her bitterness and her grief and her confusion and the scotch that Howard kept down here, emerges five months later with the bare bones of an artificial intelligence and probably some kind of liver problem, hands a wreck.

That’s what brings her out of it, really. A glance down at grease smears and ripped cuticles, scrapes and bruises and some kind of unidentifiable stain on her left palm, a few burns raw and shiny where she caught her own knuckles with a soldering iron.

Her mother would be horrified.

Her mother is dead, though.

Toni leaves the workshop, leaves the house, tells Obie she’s moving to Malibu and would he (and the company) like to come along? Tells him there are too many memories in the New York house.

She isn’t really sure if she’s lying or not.

JARVIS doesn’t become JARVIS then, is really only a fraction of himself, a framework of possibilities. She leaves him there for six or seven years, frustrated by the technology that she has to work with, how far it is outstripped by the things she can envision. She wanders back when she thinks she can get some real goddamn work done, can make something she’s proud of.

But even then, even all gussied up and almost done, even with everything it could be pulsing under her fingertips, it isn’t JARVIS yet. Doesn’t have a name, a voice, a personality.

She’s just flown back from first Jarvis’s funeral (and if you ever say the real Jarvis, Antonia Stark will kill you dead) and she finds herself choosing a voiceprint for her new, as yet unnamed A.I. She doesn’t really know why.

It just makes sense, okay?

***

Tony kind of loses it, a little, those first years in Malibu. Not that he even had it to begin with, you could argue. Many people have. But even by Tony Stark standards, there are some bad years. Years before Pepper, years with Rhodey on the other side of the world and Jarvis on the other side of the country and Obie running his (dad’s) company and Tony, alone in a basement with DUM-E and U for company.

Years when his mother was dead.

It shouldn’t have made that much of a difference to him; it wasn’t like they’d had some great, revelatory mother-son relationship.

But they could have, maybe.

He tries not to wonder whether or not it would have changed anything.

He doesn’t do too well.

***

It’s not like Toni didn’t always know that Howard wanted a boy. It’s not like he hadn’t made it painfully obvious, not like she hadn’t managed to figure out that she was supposed to have been Howard Anthony Stark Jr., not Antonia Elizabeth Stark.

She tries not to wonder whether Maria had felt the same way, or if it had been only after realizing what a disappointment of a daughter Toni was that the disaffection had begun. If there had ever been a chance to be what her mother wanted, if she’d been a boy (Iron Man, the press calls her, she calls herself, Iron Man, and like hell that’s a Freudian slip, she owns it, goes for it, opens her mouth wide at the press conference and admits it, Iron Man). If she’d been a proper girl. If she’d been anyone other than Toni Stark, clean and pretty on the outside and rotten all the way through.

She tries not to wonder whether or not it would have changed anything.

She gets pretty good at it, actually.

**Author's Note:**

> issue of consent: Toni tries to kiss Rhodey while they are both (but she is much more) drunk, he prevents her


End file.
